Explanation for newbies: setuid is a special permission bit that makes an executable run with the permissions of its owner rather than the user executing it. This is often used to let a user run a specific program as root without having sudo access.

If this sounds like a security nightmare, that’s because it is.

In linux, setuid is slowly being phased out by Capabilities. An example of this is the ping command which used to need setuid in order to create raw sockets, but now just needs the cap_net_raw capability. More info: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/382771/why-does-ping-need-setuid-permission. Nevertheless, many linux distros still ship with setuid executables, for example passwd from the shadow-utils package.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    01·
    8 months ago

    In linux, setuid is slowly being phased out by

    … brittle resume-based non-unix neu tools designed to encourage quiet balkanization and vendor/dev lock-in after being pushed by vendor payola.

    See:

    • Systemd bag of festering wunderkinder shit,
    • networkManager and its 6 different competing manager-manager tools, and
    • anything else created in the dark post-mentor ages when “move fast and break things” was dreamed up by people who didn’t give a fuck about must-work tools because must-work wasn’t on their final exam at udemy.